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Disintegration: A Windy City Dark Mystery

Tekijä: Richard Thomas

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioKeskustelut
1851,184,285 (4)-
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:"A dark existential thriller of unexpected twists, featuring a drowning man determined to pull the rest of the world under with him, Disintegration is a stunning and vital piece of work."??Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
/> In a brilliantly stylish breakthrough thriller for fans of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Will Christopher Baer's Kiss Me, Judas, here is the compelling tale of a man who has lost it all??and is now navigating a crooked, harrowing path to redemption.


Once a suburban husband and father, now the man has lost all sense of time. He retains only a few keepsakes of his former life: a handmade dining room table, an armoire and dresser from the bedroom, and a tape of the last message his wife ever left on their answering machine. These are memories of a man who no longer exists. Booze and an affair with a beautiful woman provide little relief, with the only meaning left in his life coming from his assignments. An envelope slipped under the door of his apartment with the name and address of an unpunished evildoer. The unspoken directive to kill. And every time he does, he marks the occasion with a memento: a tattoo. He has a lot of tattoos.

But into this unchanging existence seep unsettling questions. How much of what he feels and sees can he trust? How much is a lie designed to control him? He will risk his own life??and the lives of everyone around him??to find out.
Advance praise for Disintegration

"Sweet hot hell, Richard Thomas writes like a man possessed, a man on fire, a guy with a gun to his head. And you'll read Disintegration like there's a gun to yours, too. It's a twisted masterpiece."??Chuck Wendig, author of Blackbirds and Double Dead

"This novel is so hard-hitting it should come with its own ice pack. Richard Thomas is the wild child of Raymond Chandler and Chuck Palahniuk, a neo-noirist who brings to life a gritty, shadow-soaked, bullet-pocked Chicago as the stage for this compulsively readable crime drama."??Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding

"Richard Thomas builds his universe and its population with terse prose and dynamic, often horrifyingly visceral imagery that unspools with grand weirdness and intensity. Then he rips that universe apart, brick by bloody brick. Disintegration is provocative. It's also damned fine noir."??Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and The Croning

"Disintegration is gritty neo-noir, a psycho-sexual descent into an unhinged psyche and an underworld Chicago that could very well stand in for one of the rings of Dante's Hell. Richard Thomas's depraved, doomed philosopher-hitman is your guide. I suggest you do as he says and follow him, if you know what's good for you."??Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep

"Gritty, obsessive, and compulsively readable."??Brian Evenson, author of Immobility

"In sharp, icy prose that cuts like a glacial wind, Richard Thomas's dark Chicago tale keeps us absolutely riveted to the very end."??Donald Ray Pollock, author of T… (lisätietoja)
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näyttää 5/5
A strange, dark story. I couldn't put it down. It offered no hope or redemption for the main character. Enjoyable but slightly depressing. ( )
  scot2 | Jul 1, 2017 |
4.5 stars

Disintegration is the first book in Richard Thomas's Windy City Dark Mystery series, and the key word here is "dark." Thomas has written a first-class example of that subset of noir fiction known as "hard-boiled," offering a bleak vision of America, set against a dark and gritty urban scene and populated by a protagonist whose amorality and ruthlessness make him at times indistinguishable from the villains. Nevertheless, we care about Disintegration's unnamed "hero" because he didn't start out this way:

"Maybe those with the most to lose have the furthest to fall. Maybe the ones with everything, the American dream realized, they become the best soldiers. Because without love, there cannot be hate. Without a fullness, there cannot be a void. To be fractured, you must be solid once, a presence, a rock, complete."

As is the case in the best hard-boiled fiction, it is precisely the negative aspects of his broken character which make his ultimate sacrifice all the more powerful.

Strangely, it was this self-same emotional denouement which dropped my rating from 5 stars to 4.5. I won't disclose what bothered me here, so as to avoid spoiling the climax for other readers, but I have asked about it on Goodreads and would be delighted if another Goodreads member (or, even better, Mr. Thomas himself!) would answer my question. Suffice it to say that I found the ending illogical, though still gut-wrenching.

Disintegration's designation as part of a series is a bit misleading. The continuing presence in these novels is not a character whose personality might develop over the course of the series, but Chicago, the Windy City itself. Each book stands, and can be fully enjoyed, alone. Whether you start with Disintegration or Thomas's latest book Breaker, you are in for a fantastic reading experience.

I received a free copy of Disintegration through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )
  BrandieC | Feb 1, 2016 |
Remember how gunslingers used to etch a notch in the gun handle every time they killed someone? Here’s a new way to keep track. Our unnamed protagonist tells us, “Every time I kill I get a new tattoo. I have a lot of tattoos.” But he is more than just a hitman awaiting the next set of instructions from Vlad. He used to have a life – a real life with a wife and two children. All three were killed in a car accident. Now, he seems most human when he is paying attention to his stray cat, Luscious. He has saved very little from his former life, but he does have an answering machine tape he replays from time to time. One side is the last message she would ever leave him. The other is the police contacting him to inform him of the accident. His family was his everything, so he is only a shadow of the man he once was.

Because the protagonist has lost his time perspective largely due to booze and drugs, the reader is unable to follow it as well. It is very dark, mysterious, and anguished. The author takes us into the mind of a man who has lost his world and just doesn’t care anymore. Yet he lives from scene to scene – if you can call it living. The novel is well written. The reader doesn’t just read despair, they feel it. Rating: 3 out of 5. ( )
  FictionZeal | Jun 11, 2015 |
DISINTEGRATION is hard-hitting dark noir of the highest order. The book moves at a breathless pace both in terms of plot and style. Writing with an incisive voice and relentless prose, Thomas explores some of the darkest material I've ever read. He manages to balance the darkness touches of subtle beauty.

Filled with taut, raw-edged material—sugar, glass, and cocaine—the book is thrilling, disturbing, gut-wrenching, and always, always entertaining. Set in Chicago and featuring a nameless protagonist, we follow a desperate man forced to do desperate things—a man living in the margins, a man lost to the world and to himself.

With fluid prose, compelling action, a flair for the literary and including a handful of subtle literary references, DISINTEGRATION excels at being both smart and tough. It takes us down dingy, mist-filled streets. It offers keen observations of human nature, and explores the zoos we construct for ourselves, the labyrinths, the never-sufficient penance we inflict on ourselves and others. A story of grief and regret, of rage and violence, of the need to break free, the novel moves at frenetic pace. Broken out into 100 chapters (some no longer than a handful of lines) DISINTIGRATION simply moves, sometimes so fast it will leave your head spinning.

The plotting seems simple enough at first: the protagonist is a damaged-goods enforcer who kills because he has to, because he wants to, because it’s his only form of escape from his demons. Similar to Dexter, the protagonist takes out the filth, the top predator in the food chain. However, as the book progresses, we learn that things are more complicated than we’d imagined; that secretes lay beneath secrets, that the man we think we know doesn’t know his own story.

Thomas does an exemplary job of withholding information, delivering it in a trickle that like the protagonist’s chemical dependence, keeps you desperate for more. Thomas also finds myriad ways to make this gritty killer likable so that when the book reaches its conclusion, we feel WITH him as much as we do FOR him. That’s the real accomplishment of the book: it’s easier to horrify than it is to inspire compassion. Thomas does both.

DISINTEGRATION is a fantastic read and well worth the price of admission. ( )
  nmbeauchamp | May 27, 2015 |
I finished Disintegration last night and I'm still shuddering from the after effects, unsure what to say about it all. So I'll start with this: The writing is excellent.

Written in first person, the experience is like being pulled into a twisted, psychotic, drug-addicted mind. This is exactly how it needs to be, because the main character is anything but normal. He is off balance and, consequently, so are we. Reading this book is a bit like being drugged. I was left teetering, wondering whether I'd crossed the line from reality into madness.

This book is not for the overly sensitive or squeamish reader. The content is raw and brutal, like an acid trip gone bad. And yet I wasn't looking for an antidote. I was hooked, like an addict, ill at ease but oddly compelled to seek another fix.

*I was provided with an advanced copy by Alibi via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.* ( )
  Darcia | Feb 26, 2015 |
näyttää 5/5
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Englanninkielinen Wikipedia

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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:"A dark existential thriller of unexpected twists, featuring a drowning man determined to pull the rest of the world under with him, Disintegration is a stunning and vital piece of work."??Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
In a brilliantly stylish breakthrough thriller for fans of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Will Christopher Baer's Kiss Me, Judas, here is the compelling tale of a man who has lost it all??and is now navigating a crooked, harrowing path to redemption.


Once a suburban husband and father, now the man has lost all sense of time. He retains only a few keepsakes of his former life: a handmade dining room table, an armoire and dresser from the bedroom, and a tape of the last message his wife ever left on their answering machine. These are memories of a man who no longer exists. Booze and an affair with a beautiful woman provide little relief, with the only meaning left in his life coming from his assignments. An envelope slipped under the door of his apartment with the name and address of an unpunished evildoer. The unspoken directive to kill. And every time he does, he marks the occasion with a memento: a tattoo. He has a lot of tattoos.

But into this unchanging existence seep unsettling questions. How much of what he feels and sees can he trust? How much is a lie designed to control him? He will risk his own life??and the lives of everyone around him??to find out.
Advance praise for Disintegration

"Sweet hot hell, Richard Thomas writes like a man possessed, a man on fire, a guy with a gun to his head. And you'll read Disintegration like there's a gun to yours, too. It's a twisted masterpiece."??Chuck Wendig, author of Blackbirds and Double Dead

"This novel is so hard-hitting it should come with its own ice pack. Richard Thomas is the wild child of Raymond Chandler and Chuck Palahniuk, a neo-noirist who brings to life a gritty, shadow-soaked, bullet-pocked Chicago as the stage for this compulsively readable crime drama."??Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding

"Richard Thomas builds his universe and its population with terse prose and dynamic, often horrifyingly visceral imagery that unspools with grand weirdness and intensity. Then he rips that universe apart, brick by bloody brick. Disintegration is provocative. It's also damned fine noir."??Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and The Croning

"Disintegration is gritty neo-noir, a psycho-sexual descent into an unhinged psyche and an underworld Chicago that could very well stand in for one of the rings of Dante's Hell. Richard Thomas's depraved, doomed philosopher-hitman is your guide. I suggest you do as he says and follow him, if you know what's good for you."??Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep

"Gritty, obsessive, and compulsively readable."??Brian Evenson, author of Immobility

"In sharp, icy prose that cuts like a glacial wind, Richard Thomas's dark Chicago tale keeps us absolutely riveted to the very end."??Donald Ray Pollock, author of T

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